


A Slice of a Breath

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 11:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6469276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reverb survives. Because that's what he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Slice of a Breath

**Author's Note:**

> With much credit to awwnutbunnies, who has brought the delight of RP back into my life and given me a new view on Cisco.

Reverb survives because that’s what he does. That’s what he has always done. That’s what they all do. He can see all of his many selves, spread thin over near infinite worlds, and none of them succumb. It’s as if time itself won’t let them die, bending and shaking to prevent a million possible endings. 

Reverb heals his own broken heart and stands up in an empty warehouse. He puts his goggles on and straightens his clothes. He prefers to look seamless, flawlessly slick as a machine. Even his speech was copied and smoothed, taken from Shakespearean actors with their perfect diction. 

He takes in the grubby warehouse, the missing elements. He heads home. 

Not to the place everyone thinks he lives, the glass and steel apartment perched high above the city and about as defensible as a sandcastle. No, back to his real home. The pit of a room below a raucous bar that doesn’t know it has a tenant. His wired up nest with its thousand electronic eyes to compound his own wide vision. 

He drinks ginger beers saturated with lime juice as his fingers chase over his keyboard. He can sense Vibe still somewhere in his city, the two of them in one place a delicious sandpaper scratch over his senses. He considers reaching out, but Vibe is still so tone deaf to the song of their many selves. 

Instead, he tracks him, follows him and watches with his many eyes their tango with Zoom. Watches Frost barely escape with her life as Zoom rages in his icy prison. 

Frost. He slides his phone out of his pocket and considers it, rubbing a thumb over the buttons. He knew he scared her. That he had worked hard to scare her. But he needed allies now and they might be the only two people that understood what they were up against. 

He sends the message. An offer of first aid and food. Guides her to an address close enough that he can retrieve her and bring her here without much trouble. 

He waits, spider heavy in his web and nurses his own hurts. 

He cannot help, but relive Vibe turning him down, Zoom discovering his betrayal. The easy way in which he was disposed of. 

Frost returns his message with a curt, _Fuck you. Pick me up in fifteen._

That seems appropriate, all things considered. He takes out the bike, running his hands all over it’s clean sharp lines to ensure all is as it should be. Then he tears out and finds her, sticking out like the sorest of thumbs on a street corner. If she didn’t look so dangerous, johns would be offering her cash. 

“Get on,” he doesn’t much acknowledged her hesitation. The way she slides her hands to rest on him as minimal as possible. “You want to fall off, it’s your funeral.” 

She fists her hands into the leather after that, criss-crossed over his chest. He hasn’t ridden with a passenger for a while, but he remembers how to compensate. She doesn’t say a word when he pulls down the ramp into his place. She watches her only egress disappear with only faint concern. 

There’s blood dripping out from under her stupid bustier, a very slow trickle that shows nowhere else. 

“Great,” he pinches his nose and directs her to the kitchenette where the light is unnaturally bright compared to the rest of the place. “Sit.” 

She hops up on the counter, perhaps in some kind of act of defiance, but he can see how much even that tears at her wounds. He rifles through his drawers, takes out an older t-shirt that should cover her. 

“Switch out the leather for this. I’ll be able to work on you better if I’m not cutting through that stupid thing.” 

She takes it slowly, eyes narrowing at him. 

“Why are you doing this?” She demands. Not ‘how are you still alive’. Interesting. 

“I need you alive and functional,” he turns his back. 

“What for?” He hears the creak and bend of movement, the heavy sound of leather falling against granite. 

“To kill Zoom.” 

“I told you before- And you saw what just happened! He killed Ronnie...nearly killed you apparently and me-” 

“I wasn’t suggesting that we attempt it alone.” 

“With who then?” She asks, bitter and he wonders if she’s cried yet. “You can turn around.” 

He picks up his kit and takes it to her. She looks small in the swamp of worn cotton, still cowering away from him as he stands beside her. 

“We’re going to raise an army,” he takes out thread, a needle and numbing lotion. She reluctantly peels the shirt up to show the deep cut. He doesn’t ask when she picked it up. Zoom doesn’t leave bloody marks. 

She watches in tense silence as he sews her closed, smear antibiotic over the wound and tapes it. Stays quiet as he surveys her bruises, cleans out a few other more minor cuts. 

“You’re good at this,” she says eventually when he’s done all he can do. 

“It’s easier on someone else,” he admits and makes a point of turning around again to put the kit away so he doesn’t have to see her face. Let her make of that what she will. 

Let her see him, fractionally, as human. They will both need to make such concessions to each other if this is all to work. 

“So,” she says with the psychotic brightness he’s more used to from her, “where are we going to get an army?” 

“Metas,” he opens his refrigerator, hands her a bottle of water. “It isn’t just the small handful of us that hate how things are being done. How none of us can get a bottle of milk without setting off alarms. We’re becoming hunted. Hated. It won’t be hard to mine the disaffected.” 

“A revolution,” she muses, checking the cap’s seal, before opening and drinking. He approves of that maneuver. 

“Exactly.” 

She stays because where else can she go? She had never thought to have a secondary hideout, not when she and Ronnie felt so secure in each other. There’s only one bed, but Reverb sleeps upright at his desk more often than not. Dreaming is dangerous. Vibe slips back to his own world, but his mind is too easy for Reverb to find now. It assaults him when he closes his eyes, shows him the life of a kicked dog adopted into a fresh new family. It pains him to see Vibe so eager to please and so happy to be petted by his friends. How can he stand the easy way they take his abilities without acknowledgement. 

How can he stand to be loved so casually? 

So Reverb sleeps at his desk, in fragmented moments or deliberately casts himself further, picking up on a tumble of other Franciscos and their myriad lives. None of them stay for more than a heartbeat, there and gone again with their scars, their wide brown eyes. One of them reaches for him, but he’s gone before he can decide if he will reach back. 

“You go very still,” Frost tells him as she smears peanut butter over bread. She isn’t wearing lipstick, but her lips are still faintly blue. “When you aren’t here.” 

“Absence,” he shrugs, folds meat into his own bread, eating mechanically. “My breathing and heart beat slow as well.” 

“I don’t know if mine beats at all,” she takes a neat bite, her teeth leaving a perfect impression behind. 

They find others. The kind of meta that has been able to hide this long should be harder to root out. But he has his visions and Frost has her own powers of persuasion. The line up their tin soldiers, disaffected and varied as the elements. They turn to tar, to smoke, to electric energy. They weep arsenic, spit acid, and bleed mercury. 

“We want the right to walk down the street without everyone pointing,” one of them tells him, holding his hand as if he were a savior. “Please.” 

“I’ll give you more than that,” he assures them, but he lacks the charisma to soothe their concerns.

He’s not a leader, he learns slowly. His illusions leave him as their people gather and he works to keep bodies fed and clothed. He wishes there was someone else in charge. Frost isn’t much good there either and they fight almost as much as they actually plan in their meetings. 

“Please,” someone touches him. 

He hates it. Hates all of it. 

Vibe trembles across the void, a warning shot through worlds. A name. 

“Zoom is Jay Garrick,” Reverb tells Frost and she shakes her head in denial. 

“But the Flash was seen-” 

“You know what he can do,” he cuts her off. “The illusions he’s capable of.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” she says eventually, over the pallet they’ve turned into a war room. “By any other name.” 

She’s right. He concedes on the squabble they were having before he fished the information out of the ether. He does that more now. Conceding. Compromising. 

Their people are hungry and tired. They scrape at him. They want his protection. His terrible assurances. 

The facade gains chips and dents. He loses his jacket to a shivering little girl and never manages to wrest it back. There’s no place for hot showers, no time to smooth his hair obsessively back. It falls, tumbleweed across his face as he builds something larger than himself out of flesh instead of metal. 

_We’re coming back,_ Vibe calls him across the void. _We’re going to take care of Zoom/_

_Save your energy,_ Reverb sends back the slam of a door, the key locking away Vibe’s doe eyes. _I’m taking care of it._

They practice, they drill, they turn themselves into weapons. Frost and Reveb watch, direct. They don’t need practice. They are sharp blades, honed one against the other now. 

With twenty-seven metas, it’s almost laughably easy to take Zoom down. They set traps, they work as a unit and he’s burned, frozen, vibrated, tarred, smoked, flared, electrocuted out of existance. They leave only a black smear behind. 

They do it all in front of cameras. They stand unarmed, but with their own abilities in the eyes of the city. 

“We’re here now,” Reverb stands in front of them all, Frost at his side. “Learn to fucking deal with it.” 

His beautiful cultivated voice has been shot to shit. He speaks with an accent once ripped out by the roots. It’s warm on his tongue or maybe that’s the copper of blood. 

The next time he stands side by side with Vibe, it’s front of a courthouse. A legal battle raging inside while his army thrusts up signs and chants. It’s a different kind of war, that he hadn’t planned to fight.

“I’m proud of you,” Vibe tells him over the screams of the crowd. 

“Fuck your pride,” Reverb takes off his goggles, studies his dopple. “It’s about survival.” 

Vibe studies him for a long time then reaches out, brings their foreheads together. He doesn’t seem to want anything. To need anything. He just holds on. 

“Fuck you too,” he tells him and squeezed the back of his neck hard. “You come find me, if you need me.” 

Then he fades into thin air, the ghost of his sweet breath lingering in the air. 

Reverb takes in a deep breath and let’s it out slowly. He survives that moment. And the next. Because that’s what he does.


End file.
